Re: [gentoo-user] Errors in nonexistent partitions

[antlists]

On 13/09/2020 11:17, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> Morning all,
>
> My ~amd64 system uses partitions 1 to 18 on /dev/nvme0n1, and it has two SATA
> disks as well, for various purposes. Today, after I'd taken the system down
> for its weekly backup (I tar all the partitions to a USB disk) and started up
> again, invoking gparted to look around, libparted spat out a list of
> partitions from 19 to 128 which, it said, "have been written but we have been
> unable to inform the kernel of the change..."
>
> I remerged gparted, parted, libparted and udisks, then booted another system
> and ran fsck -f on all the partitions from 4 to 18 - those that this system
> uses - and rebooted. No change - the same complaint from libparted.
>
> I get a similar complaint about /dev/sda.
>
> Those errors are repeated once.
>
> Is this a terminal condition? I could repartition and restore from backup, but
> I hope someone can offer a clue before I resort to that.
>
You're using the wrong tool to try and fix it. There's clearly something 
wrong with your partition TABLE, and you're using a tool that fixes the 
partition CONTENTS.

Use gparted (or gdisk) on the DISK, and that should sort things out. 
Check whether it thinks those partitions exist or not, and then get it 
to write a new partition table to clean things up.

Cheers,
Wol